The transport systems of many large cities, including London, Paris and Singapore, require users to have a proprietary transit card in order to pay for their journey. It would be a lot more convenient for users of a transport system to not be required to own such transit cards. The transport systems of some transit agencies are therefore being adapted to accept standard bank issued cards, with the payment for a user's journey made as an online transaction. A problem experienced when allowing users to use a bank card to validly enter and exit a transport system is that the time required to perform an on-line transaction with the user's bank card is longer than an acceptable length of time for delaying a user on entry and exit of the transport system.
Known implementations of transport systems that allow users to pay for their journey with bank cards do not therefore typically perform an on-line transaction with the cards on entry and/or exit of the user from the transport system. The transport system only securely authenticates that each user's card is a suitable card for payment and that the card is not on a list of cards that are denied access to the transport system, i.e. a status list. The status list, that may be considered to be a black list, includes details of cards that have balances to be settled and also details of cards that are denied travel for other reasons, such as the card being reported stolen or the user of the card being banned from travel on the transport system.
In order for the journey to be paid for, the transaction is made by the acquirer of the transport system sending a request for payment to the issuer of the bank card of the user. The request is sent either when the user is travelling on the transport system or when the user has already exited the transport system. If the payment request is denied by the issuer, the user is in debt to the transit agency that provides the transport system as they have already consumed travel services. In order ensure that the debt is recovered, the transport system typically adds the details of the bank card of the user to the transport system's status list of cards. The user is therefore prevented from travelling on the transport system until the outstanding balance has been settled.
A problem with the above technique of status listing a user is that the user may not be aware that their card has been added to status list and therefore has a very poor experience when their next attempt to enter the transport system is denied. Moreover, even if a user is aware that their card has been status listed, the user is required to perform the inconvenient process of manually performing a task before being able to travel again.
In order to solve the above problems, automatic debt recovery may be performed. To perform automatic debt recovery, the transport system automatically sends one or more further requests for payment to the issuer of the card (via their acquirer). If one of these requests is approved by the issuer, and payment is therefore made, the transit agency will typically automatically remove the card details of the user from the status list. A user may therefore be both added and removed from the status list without the user manually performing a task, or the user even knowing that their card was entered on the status list. However, a problem experienced by the known automatic debt recovery techniques is that whether or not it will work is highly speculative. The number of allowed requests the technique is typically limited and the acquirer can only guess a time for transmitting each request with no way of knowing whether the request is likely to work. Moreover, automatic debt recovery requests typically may not start until 4 days after a declined authorisation of a transaction and a user may well attempt to travel on the transport system before an automatic debt recovery request has been sent.
In addition, with regard to effective updating of the status list, the mechanism for updating the status list is slow and inherently restricted by the way that the transport system obtains transaction data.
There is therefore a need to improve the automatic transfer of data in general.